Tom Hiddleston Gave Ke Huy Quan Some Good Acting Advice

Academy Award-winning actor Ke Huy Quan became the latest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe when he joined the cast of the second season of the hit Disney+ show Loki. With the season now wrapped, Quan reflected on his time on set working with series star Tom Hiddleston and what it was like to play his character Ouroboros. 

His character is a technical brainiac, and nailing his dialogue wasn’t exactly an easy task for Quan. 

“It was hard!” he said honestly in an interview with Variety. “I’m telling you, it was not easy! In the beginning, I kept messing up my lines. My character is responsible for a lot of the exposition. So it would just be pages and pages of dialogue.” 

“I didn’t understand, what is the ‘temporal loom’? What is the ‘throughput multiplier’? I could barely say it in the beginning,” he remembered. “I had to ask [executive producer] Kevin Wright: ‘You have to show me what it is.’ I have to visualize it in my head in order for me to say this dialogue. So he showed me visuals. There was a miniature model of the temporal loom.”

At one point, he even went to Hiddleston for advice. “In Episode 6, he was just spitting out that dialogue at 100 miles per hour. I was blown away by his performance,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Tom, how do you do that?’ It comes so naturally for him. He talked about his method. He showed me how to do it. And of course, you know, I practiced it, and it worked.”

Related: Tom Hiddleston Returns as the God of Mischief in New ‘Loki’ Trailer

Quan noted that “there’s no secret” to Hiddleston’s way of getting his lines down. “It’s really looking at the dialogue and reading it very, very slowly the first few times, and then as you become more comfortable with it, then you start picking it up. It’s just that repetition, but start very slow,” he said. “I do the opposite. I jump right in and I’ll practice it as if I will be saying it in camera. But his process is just start very slow and familiarize yourself with every single word. That’s the method that I’ve been using ever since.”

Season 2 of Loki—complete with all of Quan’s at-times confusing dialogue—is streaming on Disney+ now.